
SAP and SuccessFactors HR2016 and a Special Discount Code
The 15th Annual SAP HR2016 Conference will be held in Las Vegas from February 23 – 26 at the Las Vegas Wynn hotel. It is regularly considered, along with SuccessConnect, one of premier events for SAP and SuccessFactors professionals, consultants and customers. There are more than 130 sessions, 50 exhibitors, 20 case studies, 32 hours […]

Making Markodojo | Untold SaaS Product Secrets
Today, I’m excited to announce the launch of Markodojo, my agile marketing management SaaS startup and an entirely new breed of enterprise marketing software. You say: “That’s great Joel, but what’s in it for me?” Well, if you are a marketing manager, please skip to the shameless plug below, then head straight to the Markodojo […]

It’s Time For You To Make Security a Core Feature — Not a Tax
So many things have gotten better on the product side of SaaS in the past few years. Amazing tools, the evolution of AWS as “enterprise grade”, so many great things. One thing I am less impressed with though is the evolution of SaaS security — application-level security, in particular. Let me give you two recent […]

The Missed Opportunity of Agile SaaS
As the launch date approaches for Markodojo, my agile marketing SaaS startup, I’ve been thinking a lot about how my SaaS experiences have shaped my thinking on agile management, and visa versa. SaaS and agile present complementary aspects that enable a uniquely symbiotic relationship. Agile aims to help businesses increase responsiveness to customer needs, while […]

Data Analytics: Accelerating The Velocity of Innovation
Enterprises are suffering a scarcity of insight. Think about it. There is an unprecedented amount of data in the world, and it is growing exponentially by the day. In fact, according to IBM, 2.5 billion gigabytes of data are created each day. This data is being generated by everything from smartphones to enterprise databases; scientific, […]

Does Google’s Knowledge Graph have a ‘facts’ problem?
Does Google’s Knowledge Graph have a ‘facts’ problem?: Maybe. It might, of course, be unwise for a single short response at the top of a set of search results to even try to ‘answer’ a question when we think, theorise or hypothesise towards an answer, rather than knowing it. I’m not suggesting, for a moment, that Google’s current […]

The Discriminatory Dark Side Of Big Data
It has happened again. Researchers have discovered that Google’s ad-targeting system is discriminatory. Male web users were more likely to be shown high paying executive ads compared to female visitors. The researchers have published a paper which was presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in Philadelphia. I had blogged about the dark side of […]

Open Source Software and the US Government
Open Source Software and the US Government: “…it has been determined that — in general — Members and staff in the U.S. House of Representatives, when conducting official business, now have a choice between using proprietary and closed technology and open source solutions that are restriction-free, reusable and frequently more cost-effective.” That this is news, […]

Products I Love to Use
Every year around the holidays journalists and bloggers around the world publish “top ten” lists or “annual buyer’s guides” or similar. And every year I think about doing the same. But it’s the holidays and I usually can’t be bothered. Plus, after reading everybody else’s list it feels pedestrian to publish mine. So I thought […]

Legacy tech can kill the CIO
Technical obstacles that interfere with the ability of IT to offer modern services to end-users. For example, allowing users to access all corporate services from mobile devices or providing them with sophisticated analytics tools can be difficult when the legacy infrastructure requires bolt-on products, patches, and workarounds. The CEO of Pegasystems, Alan Trefler, calls this […]

Some Thoughts on Twitter as a Micro-Blogging Tool
1/ Twitter started off positioned as a micro-blogging platform but in the end became more of an RSS reader — Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015 2/ @pmarca popularized the “Tweetstorm” which ironically brought the real concept of microblogging to Twitter many years after its inception — Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015 3/ What […]

Qlik gets cloudy, puts DataMarket to work
Qlik gets cloudy, puts DataMarket to work: On-premise visual analytics provider, Qlik, has rolled out a cloud-enabled offering that “supports the creation of dashboards and storyboards, and offers seamless sharing and interactivity, allowing users to share Qlik Sense applications” As Maria Deutscher notes in her SiliconAngle piece, this is partly about playing catch-up to the […]

When Google errs: A cautionary tale of great power
Update 4/28/15: Based on comments in response to this post, I did further research into the history of the cxotalk.com domain that I recently purchased. Based on many spam backlinks, there is no doubt this site had a bad history before my purchase. This leads to several conclusions: Before purchasing any domain at auction, be […]

An IT failure unicorn: Endless 19-year project in Massachusetts
On a regular basis, I receive calls from reporters and researchers writing about IT failures. Most often, they want context on how often these problems occur and who is to blame. However, recently, I got a different kind of call. Todd Wallack, a reporter for the Boston Globe, got in touch with a strange question. […]

IBM doubles down on health with Watson
IBM doubles down on health with Watson: Hot off its Jeopardy win, IBM’s clever Watson quickly started looking for problems that might help Big Blue recoup some of the project’s development costs. Healthcare was one obvious area, with relatively constrained sets of problems, copious data to ingest and understand, and oodles (a technical term) of […]